Photo Credit: Todd McPhail
CHAPEL HILL, NC – This summer’s political party conventions? Strictly small potatoes. What’s really needed now, given the state of the planet, is a congress of all life forms.
That intriguing suggestion takes form in EARTH & SKY, A GREAT GATHERING FOR ALL BEINGS, Paperhand Puppet Intervention‘s new outdoor summer pageant of puppetry and music at Chapel Hill’s Forest Theatre through Sept. 29. The show takes its concept from “The Council of All Beings,” an environmental ritual devised in Australia in 1985. According to author and activist Joanna Macy, who created the practice with John Seed, the rite “challenge[s] the anthropocentrism of industrial culture” by letting participants “step aside from their human identity and speak on behalf of another life-form.”
In the Paperhand version, Baba McDaniel Roberts of the African American Dance Ensemble serves as griot, invoking and ushering in a procession of fantastical puppets from fox and possums to bears and wolves. Alongside them, a fiery, wild forest spirit (plus one who bears more than a passing resemblance to rock icon Robert Plant) and what appears to be twerking gold snub-nosed monkeys, jubilantly dance in to the funky stylings of the Paperhand band.
These vibrant creations – dozens in all, from small, flat shadow puppets projected on screens to massive, multi-story creatures who take up to five puppeteers to bring to life – represent the work of over 200 artists, interns and volunteers who’ve crafted them out of papier mâché, fabric and bamboo since the start of the year at Paperhand’s Saxapahaw studios for this, their 24th annual show.
Photo credit: Todd McPhail
But after colorful cranes, owls, lyrebirds and flamingo puppets descend from the top of the amphitheater, the deliberations of this council grow serious. A raven intones, “The sky is our home and we see the world clearly. Our numbers are dwindling, and our flocks are fewer than ever before. We have come to find a way forward together.” (The words reflect the reality of recent studies showing that North America has lost some 2.9 billion birds, or about one in four of their total population, since 1970.) “We are here to help decide our future,” a brown bear solemnly states, before a puppet pas de deux between Taari Colman’s owl and Africa Mason’s remarkably lifelike brown bat.
Photo credit: Todd McPhail
As the sky dwellers, the creatures of Earth with fang and fur, and those called the light eaters – the plants, grasses and mushrooms – each take their place, they first deliberate on who speaks for the water which “flowed through each of them…giving life and asking nothing in return.” The first, comic, attempts by a school of mahi mahi come to naught when iridescent, but unintelligible bubbles billow forth from their mouths each time they try to speak. After the limpid frogs are chosen, they dance around a body of water: a transcendental, circular creation with a pacific face of blue in the center.
There’s play and interplay among the grasses, gourds and sprouts as they grow and bring forth puppets depicting orchids, calla lilies and two-story maples who release samara fruit – helicopter seeds. These come before puppets representing the hosts of insects: mantis, ants, pillbugs, worms and cicadas: “the multitudes, the Pollinators of flower and field…farmers of the Earth on which all depend.”
Photo credit: Todd McPhail
In their midst, the band and on-stage corps break out into Jason Peter Gabriel’s new tune, “Compost Yourself,” a conspicuously cheery song and dance about nonattachment – or decomposition, that darker side of the circle of life, to be more precise: “The world of today is, quite simply / The ether of yesterday’s trash / From a massive volcanic eruption / To the plants that arise from its ash / But nothing disappears, it only takes a different form / And everything that lives will someday die, and be reborn.”
But the benedictions of a bee, a toad, and a marvelous two-story lichen puppet are interrupted by petitions at the last from unlikely creations: two creatures made from a myriad of plastic bags and bottles that represent those pollutants that have infiltrated our air, water, earth and food.
Photo credit: Todd McPhail
“We are your children,” the spiky plastic bottle being plaintively says. “But when you are done with us, you discard us.” “You call us trash, refuse,” the billowing brown plastic bag creature cajoles. “You try to forget us…but we will be here longer than you. We were born of this Earth just like you. And just like you we long to be cared for.”
Thoughtful words, as is often the case from Paperhand, that remind us of our connections with creation – and all we have created.
Paper hand Puppet Intervention’s Earth & Sky continues at the Forest Theatre through September 29.
